


Sleepless Nights

by Naughty_Yorick



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Dreaming, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD, Post Long Night, also: babies, but has a hopeful ending, dealing with the fallout, it's sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 15:34:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18781141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naughty_Yorick/pseuds/Naughty_Yorick
Summary: The fifth night he spends in her bed, she wakes with a start and sits up, with a shout.He's immediately awake too, looking for the source of her fear, looking for an intruder...but there is none.“Just a bad dream.” She says, waving his concern away, “I'm fine.”No one can face a horde of wights without coming away with scars. A brief one-shot on the impact of the Long Night on Jaime and Brienne.





	Sleepless Nights

The fifth night he spends in her bed, she wakes with a start and sits up, with a shout. 

He's immediately awake too, looking for the source of her fear, looking for an intruder...but there is none.

“Just a bad dream.” She says, waving his concern away, “I'm fine.”

But as she lays back down, he can feel she's still shaking, and he pulls her into his arms beneath the furs and presses her into him, arms wrapped around her. Slowly, she calms. He can feel her pulse in her wrist slow.

Finally, she rolls over so her hand is pressed against his chest and her head buried in the crook of his arm, and says “I thought I saw…” and her breath catches.

She doesn't need to say anything else. He can guess at the content of her dreams, because they fill his too.

They aren't the only ones suffering with visions. No one is keen to talk about it, at first, but it's clear that Winterfell is running on too little sleep.

While training - Brienne insists on training, even now - Pod fumbles an easy hit and instead of righting himself, stumbles and falls. The deep purple bags beneath his eyes give him away. 

Jaime grabs a moment of solitude with Tyrion, who confesses that after his night in the crypts he's now being chased through dreams by dead Starks. The Lady Sansa, he says, suffers more: she is haunted by her parents and her brothers, forced to plunge dragonglass daggers into their chests every night.

Jaime tells him about his own nightmares, but it isn't until later that wonders just how his brother is so familiar with the Lady of Winterfell’s dreams.

One night, after both of them had woken in a cold sweat, they stayed awake, holding each other beneath the soft coverings, and told each other what they saw.

For Brienne, it was being trapped against the wall, with nowhere to run. For Jaime, it was the inevitable wave of wights, the way they’d crashed upon the living like surf against rocks. Both of their dreams ended the same way:

_And then they came, and they reached you, and they dragged you away from me._

Within a few weeks, the distraction of war and subterfuge provides some respite, although Jaime isn't sure what's worse: the dreams where he's ripped apart by wights, or the ones where he watches his sister die. 

Time heals all wounds, they say. Soon there is another ruler on the Iron Throne, the dead long since burnt, and the living can continue to live. The dreams abate, but never fully disappear - they accept them, now, as just another scar of war.

After the twins are born, the nightmares get worse.

Neither of them sleep at all for that first night, too easily startled by every sound, every movement. The children sleep well; everyone describes them as _easy_ babies, and wonders why their parents seem to have gone weeks without rest. 

Jaime and Brienne dare not tell them the truth: the maesters and septas and even, Gods forbid, Lord Selwyn, don’t need to know about the horrors they saw at Winterfell. In their brief but regular messages between friends and allies back on the mainland, they often speak of how the dreams have gotten worse since the children have arrived. 

Tyrion replies, in his typically cryptic way, that he’s looking forward to it.

Often, the panicked yells of one will wake the other from their own nightmare, leaving them both scrambling for their swords in the ensuing chaos. It's only after the drapes are sliced neatly in half (neither can remember who did it; each blames the other) that they begrudgingly accept that the swords are best left in the adjacent room, and not by the bedside.

Brienne quickly loses count of the amount of times she checks upon the children in a dream only to see glowing blue eyes staring back at her. Jaime watches them swallowed up by a sea of living bodies. Both of them see the stumbling, shuffling creatures climb through windows, smash through doors, and grab the babies from their cots. 

Eventually, the dreams become regular, rather than nightly. Then common, then occasional. They never stop altogether, but they find ways to cope with the visions. It's a necessary skill, not just for dealing with the nightmares: it means that Brienne is no longer reaching for Oathkeeper every time someone is unexpectedly behind her, means that Jaime isn't shaking every time there's a sudden noise.

They both have trouble with crowds.

Things never go back to normal, to the way they were. They never expect them to: fighting the dead, overthrowing a Queen, admitting your feelings to the person you've been in love with for years and, on top of it all, trying to corral two impetuous toddlers tends to leave one changed. But it's a change for the better.

When they walk barefoot along the pristine white sands of Tarth, or watch Joanna chase the birds in the garden with her wooden sword, or listen to Cat beg for more stories of their adventures instead of going to sleep, it's easy to forget the darkness that once hounded them.

The bad dreams are worth it, after all, for the sweetness of being awake.


End file.
